The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. This chapter explores the haunting or ghostly presence of both the living and the dead. The ghosts of slavery and colonialism haunt the character/s and the text; in retaliation, Xuela/Kincaid performs a “ghosting” by defying narrative conventions, by blurring the line between fiction, myth, biography, and autobiography. Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother tells the story of loss, abandonment, survival, and resistance. A creolized subject (daughter of a Carib mother and a half Scot, half-African father), the novel’s protagonist, Xuela Claudette Richardson, embodies resistance, for she not only survives her mother’s death, but she also survives her father’s subsequent abandonment and several foster homes. Xuela’s mother dies shortly after giving birth 108 Wagadu Volume 19, Summer 2018 © Wagadu (2018) ISSN : 1545-6196 to her, leaving her in the care of her father who, in essence, abandons her as she is shuttled from foster home to foster home: When my mother died, leaving me a small child vulnerable to all the world, my father took me and placed me in the care of the same woman he paid to wash his clothes. It is possible that he emphasized the difference between the two bundles: one was his child, not his only child in the world but the only child he had with the only woman he had married so far; the other was his soiled clothes . . . That I was a burden to him, I know.” (p. 4) In the various foster homes, Xuela not only endures cruel treatment, but she also experiences sexual abuse at the hands of her foster parents, Jacques and Lise LaBatte. Ever resilient, Xuela outlives everyone, including the LaBattes, her husband, and her sister, living until the age of seventy. Xuela’s traumatic birth resonates with the traumatic colonial history of the Caribbean, namely Dominica. Thus, Xuela’s personal account of her life experiences echoes the collective narrative of loss, displacement, extinction, and exploitation of the island’s history and its people. Critic Shu-li Chang (2004) reminds us that many women writers engage allegory as a narrative strategy: “In contemporary women’s narratives, private traumas are almost always deployed as an allegory for collective traumas” (p. 106). While Xuela’s mother’s death symbolizes the extinction of the Carib people: “The Carib people had been defeated and then exterminated, thrown away like the weeds in the garden,” as a creolized subject, Xuela’s birth suggests the forging of a new nation, a Creolized community: “The African people had been defeated but had survived. When they looked at me, they saw only the Carib people. They were wrong . . .” (p. 16). Facing extinction and erasure, symbolized by the “x” in her name, Xuela registers her resistance.1 The simultaneous embodiment of loss and gain, the irruption/interruption of a life (of lives), of a cherished past: the loss of her mother and the loss of her Carib and African ancestors and culture are markers of Xuela’s identity and existence. She captures this loss as follows: “This realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward: at my beginning was this woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one between me and the black room of the world (p. 3). Xuela’s birth coincides with the birth of the nation; both the nation and Xuela are born of resistance. Furthermore, Xuela’s birth coincides with the birth of the novel, the creation of a “new” auto/biographical genre, a counter genre that resists narrative conventions. Xuela’s autobiography doubles as her mother’s biography; hence, Xuela is able to chronicle her life (and her mother’s life) as an “other” and a “self.” In writing as a “self” and an “other,” Xuela assumes literary power over her personal narrative, her mother’s history, and the island’s history. The doubling/merging of the text renders indistinguishable the private/personal experiences from the collective experiences; it also shifts and blurs the boundaries/definition of an auto/biography. In Postcolonial Hauntings 109 © Wagadu (2018) ISSN : 1545-6196 writing her autobiography, Xuela creates self and community; Xuela and her mother’s story is the history of the island. Kincaid’s “disguise” of the novel as an autobiography engenders a kind of grafting that challenges the strict and inflexible definitions of the traditional autobiographical genre.2 By definition, an autobiography is an account of a person’s life written by that person. Kincaid’s autobiography takes on hybrid characteristics, merging personal history with collective history, literary writing with myths, memories, and dreams. This genre-merging sets the text apart from the traditional male-centered and European autobiography.3 Kincaid’s works resist easy classification, owing to her dismissal of European classifications of genres and refusal to accept “the purity of genres,” resulting in a literary excavation of sorts that Jana Evans Braziel (2009) refers to as “autobiographical ambivalence” (p. 7). This literary excavation results in the toppling of traditional autobiography. Arguing that the stretching of “autobiography’s generic seams” is not new, “and can be likened to a restless and unmade bed [where] discursive, intellectual, and political practices can be remade,” Alison Donnell (1999) stresses that the goal of The Autobiography is not “to define itself unproblematically as a piece of life-writing which takes either herself or her mother as its subject, but as a piece which addresses the multiple imbrications of self, m/other, and writing” (p. 124). While Donnell calls attention to the importance of women’s autobiography, and particularly to Kincaid’s “stretching” of the traditional autobiographical genre, her analysis is still limited to the personal: self, m/other, and writing. As discussed earlier, Xuela and her mother’s personal experiences are linked to the collective, the Dominican community as a whole. Kincaid’s blurring/splicing of subjects presents a formidable challenge to traditional autobiography; at the same time, it results in the undecipherability of determining to whom the auto/biography belongs: mother or daughter, or both mother and daughter. Or is it a tribute to the mother/land?4 This unknowability lends itself to “ghosting,” an undecipherable haunting presence (as well as absence) that prompts Donnell to question if there is one or more than one auto/biographer of the text, and if it is “Kincaid’s mother’s auto/biography, then Kincaid is still present as the ‘ghost’ writer/biographer” (p. 127). Kincaid’s “ghosting,” her role as a ghostwriter is indisputable, evident in her repeated obsession with the mother (figure), her unrelenting portrayal of the motherdaughter relationship that is often fraught with tension. In Annie John, Kincaid portrays her imminent departure from Antigua as “ghosting,” separation from her mother, ending the motherdaughter relationship. Similarly, the eponymous heroine of the novel, Lucy refuses to read her mother’s letter in an effort to silence her.5 Kincaid is “ghosted” equally by her mother; in Annie John, Annie John Senior abruptly ends the practice of mother and daughter dressing alike, causing 110 Wagadu Volume 19, Summer 2018 © Wagadu (2018) ISSN : 1545-6196 her daughter, Annie, great angst and separation anxiety.6 Convinced that she was writing the self, Kincaid finally concedes that she was writing the m/other: At the top of the page, I wrote my full name . . . At the sight of it many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: ‘I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it.’ And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over and I wept and wept that so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one big blur. (Lucy, pp.163-4, italics mine) True to its definition, a ghost or “ghosting” has inherent, interchangeable, nebulous attributes as both mother and daughter function as a ghost/writer; they both inhabit the body/space of a ghost/writer. Furthermore, the ghosts of slavery and colonialism both haunt and instruct their writing. Xuela muses: I knew the history of an array of people I would never meet. That in itself should not have kept me from knowing them; it was only that this history of peoples that I would never meet—Romans, Gauls, Saxons, Britons, the British people—had behind it a malicious intent: to make me feel humiliated, humbled, small. Once I had identified and accepted this malice directed at me, I became fascinated with this expression of vanity: the perfume of your own name and your own deeds is intoxicating, and it never causes you to feel weary or exhausted; it is its own inspiration; it is its own renewal. (pp. 59-60) Xuela’s authoring, her recalling or “ghosting” of her dead mother, in this auto/biography, “can be seen as a type of ghost writing” (Shima, 2004, p. 63). Operating within the trope of “ghosting,” this chapter explores the haunting or ghostly presence of both the living and the dead.7 In response, or more poignantly, in retaliation to the haunting occasioned by slavery and colonialism, Kincaid performs a “ghosting” of the autobiographical genre by defying narrative conventions, by blurring the line between fiction, myth, biography, and autobiography. For example, under the spell of colonialism, Ma Eunice, Xuela’s first foster mother, is unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Fascinated by, a picture painted on [a plate made of bone china], a picture of a wide-open field filled with grass and flowers in the most tender shades of yellow, pink, blue, and green; the sky had a sun in it that shone but did not burn bright . . . This picture was nothing but a field of grass and flowers on a sunny day, but it had an atmosphere of secret abundance, happiness, and tranquility; underneath it was written in gold letters the one word HEAVEN.
It was a tall, fenced-in cage-Is this main entrance? For Visitors? [Push a button and state your business.] Umm... volunteer for University of Wyoming. Writing, Education, Class? The cage rattled slightly as I heard a buzz; gate unlocked and I stepped through. I spent weeks mulling over how to begin this piece that I knew I wanted to write as our writing class continued and I've decided best way to communicate is to include notes from (once-typed) 37 pages I compiled. Over speaking with and hearing stories of fourteen women housed at Wyoming Women's Center, I came to conclusion that too many people, myself included, do not really understand what prison is like, and we all should. Those in America that have not been convicted of a crime may feel as though criminals deserve to be in prison and prison environment is fitting for punishment. I used to be one of those people.I have always had a strange fascination with crime-mainly supported in my love of true crime shows on television. But, prior to being involved with this course, that's all I could say was source of my interest and I know that television shows are made with a certain angle. I am a dual-major business student. Upon taking Business Law my second year, I decided next step in my education was to pursue a law degree. I became involved with this University of Wyoming class and project simply by browsing courses offered for summer of 2016, and this course, taught as Women, Crime & The Law, caught my eye, as I was in middle of law school applications. When I couldn't instantly register, I emailed professor to see how to get into class. She responded and invited me to her office to speak with her. This was unusual; never before had a professor taken such measures before letting me into a class, which further increased my interest. It wasn't until we met that I learned that course involved traveling to a prison and being a part of a writing course. I actually thought each of us would be writing a memoir, so I started writing one. I really wasn't sure what to expect and had no idea what workload would be like or had any other expectations going into class, other than (honestly) some fear of unknown, hoping to enjoy experience, and to learn from this unique opportunity.Previously I thought, the law is law is law. I thought punishments should be harsher pretty much all around. I thought that crime was what divided society. I thought that time in prison wasn't enough for most crimes. And I thought rehabilitation didn't work. But, I wanted to see prison life firsthand; I did my best to open my mind and set those notions aside. Orange is New Black was my only idea of what prison was like, and while it may be similar to Piper Kerman's production, I can tell you, women's prison in Wyoming is far from Orange is New Black. My 60 hours in Wyoming Women's Center led to 37 pages of class notes I mentioned earlier. Please keep in mind that many of points are from personal opinions or experiences that may not apply to all prisons, all inmates, all processes-these were bits of discussion that intrigued me, surprised me, or led me to a question. I would like to share with you what I learned from 60 hours of nonstop discussion between inmates and women from university.LEGAL* Some of accused may meet his/her public defender on way to courtroom for his/her hearing.* An attorney can take a case pro-bono and only speak to client twice: once for meet and greet, and once more a year later when telling accused that they are going to trial. Said accused could have taken a plea for approximately 15 years rather than be sentenced to life.* An accessory to a crime can be tried, convicted, and sentenced prior to person charged for crime itself; both can be charged same. In reality, accessory receives life without parole and primary perpetrator receives life with parole, released in 2008. …
The purpose of this piece is to share the social and emotional influences which impacted the lives of two women in the context of national and international events that occurred during the lives of the two women. Darla is a resident of the Wyoming Women's Center (WWC), Wyoming's prison for women and Katy is doctoral student at the University of Wyoming. The two women met at WWC during a college writing course in which Katy cofacilitated and Darla was enrolled.1976Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak create Apple Computer Company. Patty Hearst is sentenced to seven years in prison.Darla: I was born on September second to a wild-ish girl and a sweet young man. Their marriage did not last long because, from my mom's perspective, they were just too young. She was 18 and he was 19 when they married and I was their only child. Both of them got their GEDs and neither immediately proceeded to college. I refer to my biological male parent as my father.1977Jimmy Carter is sworn in as the 39th president of the United States. George Lucas ' Star Wars is released in theaters. Elvis Presley is found dead at his Graceland home. David Berkowitz, the of Sam, is arrested in New York, after a year of murders.Darla: My birth parents decided to end their relationship when I was seven months old and, because he promised to do so in that event, my father took my mom back to her parents. This was a foolhardy promise he made to my grandpa, but my father aspired to be a man of his word so he fulfilled his promise. My mother vehemently refused to go which is why she ended up hoisted over my father's shoulder like a sack of potatoes, kicking and screaming. He set her down at my grandpa's feet on his front porch and she immediately ran barefooted down the gravel driveway. She is not aware that I know that story but I am glad that I do. It helps me understand her and myself a little better. My Nana and Papa's home became a refuge for me from then on.Katy: I was born in Syracuse, New York. My mother, a New York native, was a school teacher in Syracuse. My father, a Floridian, a southerner through and through, was a law school student at Syracuse University. I had two older sisters, Tara (five years old) and Susie (3 years old).1978The television show Dallas makes its debut. David Berkowitz Son of Sam is sentenced to 365 years in prison. Pope John Paul I dies.Katy: My father graduated from Law School at Syracuse University. Late in the year, my family moved to Florida, where my father had a job working in a family member's law office.1979McDonald's introduces the Happy Meal. The sport's channel, ESPN, makes its television debut. The Iran hostage crisis begins.Darla: My mom married my stepdad when l was two years old and we lived in La Marque, in a trailer house that her daddy helped them purchase. For the first couple of years I was allowed to go to my father and step-mom's house to visit, but Dad eventually put a stop to it. He once told me that I acted superior to him whenever I would come back from their house. Of course, at the time I didn't understand what that meant but I did understand that he was jealous and did not like it that I went to my father's house at all. This decision stopped me from having contact with my father and step-mom and I became convinced that they didn't care to have a relationship with me.I did get to spend a few weeks of each summer at my Nana and Papa's house. Papa was my hero. He called me his Little Helper because l followed him everywhere and tried to help him do all of his work. He taught me about tools so I could hand him the right ones, he let me ride on the tractor with him as he mowed the pasture, I got to go to town with him to shop for groceries and every time he would buy me a small bag of Hershey's Kisses. They are my favorite candies to this day.On Easter I got a new dress and I was so proud of it that I ran into the dining room where Papa was reading the paper and smoking his pipe to show it off to him. …
In recent years, the grammar of diversity led to neoliberal policy changes in German academia which distract from, as well as reinscribe, postcolonial power relations. What are the uses of diversity, and what is undone by the diversity paradigm? We offer a feminist postcolonial critique of some effects and pitfalls of diversity politics.
IntroductionWhen those who have the power to name and socially construct reality choose not to see or hear you, whether you are dark-skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.-Adrienne RichConflicts over diversity and multiculturalism in higher education are localized symptoms of a broader renegotiation of full citizenship in the United States.-Renato RosaldoThe United States' polity is constantly changing from the original predominantly White, heteropatriarchal, hegemonic, Judeo-Christian, capitalist society to a more global entity with diversity and multiculturalism presenting new challenges to the emerging societal arrangements and how the general populace can negotiate the question of citizenship and the daunting tasks of providing equal opportunity, social justice, and autonomous socio-political participation. Global issues and forces of immigration, religious fanaticism, internecine warfare, police brutality, and adverse economic conditions have all contributed to the new challenges to the authority of the nation state and institutions of higher learning. The perceived inadequacy for institutions of higher learning to tackle many of the issues, which are concomitant with the politics of change and social justice in the United States, could be related to the ineptitude associated with diversity leadership and failure to follow best practices on our diverse campuses.Paradoxically, diversity is here to stay, but democratic pluralism has not been appropriately designed to deal with the issues of history, geography and number of people that contribute to the strengthening of the United States' national ethos, identity and culture. Today's increasing diverse student body, faculty, staff, services, curriculums, and infrastructures, are among the major challenges facing administrators and faculty of higher education. As we elaborated in our recent anthology on diversity, higher education can sustain richer forms of learning, dynamic pedagogy and epistemology with integrity only if institutions of higher learning that profess moral and inclusive excellence are committed to diverse perspective and people of multicultural orientation (Asumah and Nagel, 2014). Nevertheless, the sustainability of inclusive excellence in education is dependent upon the quality of diversity leadership over and above the corporate style diversity management, which is a linear approach to problem solving.In this paper, we intend to interrogate the complexity involved in diversity management, in recruitment, retention and the process of inclusion. We analyze the agency of difficult dialogue that emerges in diversity management and leadership and associated benefits and pitfalls. We provide examples of some best practices and models for infusing diversity institutions into higher learning.Diversity Management versus Diversity LeadershipDiversity is concerned with the variety created in society because of the indispensability of socio-political categories and constructs of race, ethnicity, class, gender, culture, religion, and differences in the socialization of women and men, including the differences that emerge from sexual orientation, age, disability and their intersectionalities. Diversity also emphasizes how differences in viewpoints enable society to make meaning for inclusion and social justice (AAC&U, 1998, ref. anon., 2002). Diversity is sustainable through individual and institutional efforts and it has to "be carefully and intentionally interrogated, as well as managed to reduce the concomitant tension on our college campuses and in society at large" (Nagel and Asumah, 2014, p. 349).Management and leadership have similarities and differences. Both management and leadership utilize influence, collaboration with people, productivity, and attainment of goals. …
People with intellectual disabilities are commonly seen as "nonadult others" and as persons of limited credibility, and this view has implications in a number of areas. In this paper, the empirical ...
Review of Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda by Jennie Burnet, University of Wisconsin Press, 2012, 302 pp., $29.95 (paperback)Anyone who has read any of Jennie Burnet's work in article form is bound to look forward to reading her monograph Genocide Lives in Us. In meticulous detail she analyzes Rwandan women's experiences of living in the highly complex situation of a post-genocide context, in which gender relations are re-negotiated on a daily basis. The ways in which women - mostly as survivors of Rwanda's civil war and genocide - navigate a shifting terrain of social, cultural and political realities forms the heart of her analysis. Apart from her focus on women's experiences, which build the cornerstone of feminist studies, one of the reasons that her work stands out is her ability to relay intricate material plausibly. The prerogative of interpretation on Rwandan politics, social relations and cultural practices is at once highly contentious and scholarship on these matters divided. Therefore, her rereading of such categories as ethnicity or her questioning of existing policies bring to light a critique of theories and practices around reconstructing post-conflict states. For both those new to the study of Rwanda, or even those familiar with the environment of an African postconflict society, her reconstruction of the dynamics at play in Rwandan state-society relations is vital.Beyond depicting the elaborate gender landscape of Rwanda for a wider audience, Burnet employs different types of illustrative material, including photos, maps, extracts from her field notes and considerable quotations from interviews, to make her reflections on the everyday lives of those women in her study more accessible to readers. Her main interest lies in understanding how successfully gender justice can be integrated into reconciliation work in a society such as Rwanda's that has been torn apart by colonial engineering, civil war, genocide and contested practices of memory politics, all of which impact the current gender order. The text is accordingly structured into seven substantive chapters. Whereas Chapter 1 sets the historical and social background of gender relations, conflict and politics in Rwanda to date, Chapters 2 and 3 contrast official memorialization practices and personal memory experiences respectively. How such different - yet related ways of remembering - collide with each other is shown in the havoc they have caused in the personal biographies of individual women and the operation of grassroots-based women's organizations, the latter of which have to traverse these dynamic and volatile boundaries.Amplified silence, the key concept introduced in Chapter 3 primarily denoting the lacking public discussion of alleged crimes by the Rwandan Patriotic Front's armed wing during the conflict, shows itself to be a coping and survival mechanism used by women caught between official narratives and personal trauma. Women's experiences of the genocide did not end when the fighting between the warring parties ended; instead, as Burnet shows at length, concerted actions to successively end the wars, to pursue and prosecute extremists and close refugee camps have resulted in a protracted aftermath. Burnet details this issue in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, in which she describes the new social categories that adapt to the new constellation of women in the roles of wives, widows and unmarried women. At first, she focuses on discussing the fate of those Rwandan women who have been marginalized in the post-genocide order. Recalling the genocide's official narrative, these women (Tutsi wives of prisoners, rape survivors and Hutu genocide widows) were not meant to exist as distinct groups. Their existence, however, illustrates how gender and ethnicity intersects in a changing society. Thereafter, in Chapter 5, she introduces the national institutions and a variety of definitions by those actors shaping the course of reconciliation politics in the country. …
Review of In Idi Amin's Shadow: Women, and Militarism in Uganda by Alicia C. Decker, University of Ohio Press, 2014, 244 pp., $32.95 (paperback)Many Ugandans who lived under President Idi Amin's regime (1971-79) recall memories of horror, violence and instability; yet, as Alicia Decker demonstrates, some Ugandan women recall his rule as a period of opportunities and empowerment. Uganda gained its independence from Britain in October 1962, and until 1966 Milton Obote, who led Uganda's independence, served as the Prime Minister and then as President of Uganda from 1966 to 1971. Obote was overthrown in a coup d'etat staged by Idi Amin in January 1971. Many Ugandan women rejoiced when Obote fled because they despised him for abolishing kingship in 1967 and introducing a reign of corruption and violence. However, Amin continued an administration of injustices in which ethnic and religious tension intensified and hundred of thousands of civilians went missing or were murdered. Decker underscores how Amin used violence as a sociopolitical tool that reinforced women's socioeconomic vulnerability. Yet in response to this violence, women took on greater responsibilities in order to protect and financially provide for themselves and their families.Decker notes that although there are numerous studies about Amin's rule, very few include women's voices. The introduction provides an outline of the book in which Decker discusses her objective to analyze Amin's use of gendered violence. In the first chapter, Violence, Militarism and Masculinity, Decker reconstructs the biography of Idi Amin and his rise to power by beginning with his parents and providing historical context about colonial rule and Uganda's independence. The second chapter, Gender, Performance, and Pain, explores how Amin and his army used violence to establish and ensure political power; she argues that Amin's regime used gendered performances of violence to conceal the weaknesses of the military state. In Chapter Three, Of Miniskirts and Morality, Decker employs archival and oral sources to analyze Amin's effort to use women's dress regulations, and women's resistances to them, as a means to establish political legitimacy. The fourth chapter, An Accidental Liberation, focuses on the experiences of women during the economic war at the start of 1972 when Amin expelled the South Asian population and, by default, created numerous opportunities for Ugandan women of African descent. However, Decker argues that Ugandan women's retrospective appreciation of that period had less to do with approval for Amin and more to do with pervasive disapproval of the current president.Chapter 5, Neither a Privilege nor a Curse, recounts the experiences of Elizabeth Bagaya, Uganda's first female cabinet minister who endured abuse, control and manipulation while working for Amin. Bagaya's experience underscores Decker's argument that Amin had no real interest in empowering women. In Chapter 6, Widows without Graves, Decker shares women's stories of those who disappeared; they recall the nights that loved ones, usually husbands or male family relatives seen by the state as an enemy, were kidnapped by soldiers and never seen again. Decker suggests that disappearance was a meditated strategy to ignite fear and expand oppression amongst civilians and not necessarily as a performance of hypermasculine military violence. In Chapter 7, Violence in the Shadows, the downfall of the state is discussed through interviews and testimonies of women. Decker suggests that increasing threats to the military state in the mid to late 1970s caused soldiers to intensify their display of gendered violence. Gendered violence was used to emasculate men and humiliate men unable to protect their women. Decker adds that Amin lost his support by failing to maintain his rein in his security force. In Chapter 8, Militant Motherhood, Decker provides more insight on the experience of women throughout the eight month liberation struggle that led to the end of Amin rule presenting women as dynamic historical actors (p. …
Intersectional critique emerged in the aftermath of Anita Hill's spoken testimony exposing the sexual harassment she experienced as a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Hill's personal telling and the subsequent hearing by the legislators was a major disruption to the status quo of American politics since the high stakes for race and gender were played out on the civic stage for electing the Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a witness in the public forum, Hill's speech ultimately revealed the ways in which women of color were subordinated by both feminist and critical-race initiatives (Crenshaw, 1991). And yet, no amount of political debate holds as much promise for the cause of civil rights as confirming a judge who embodies the raced subject himself, who potentially speaks on behalf of the non-white constituency. Twenty-five years later, however, Justice Thomas's speech in not speaking during his term on the bench has garnered the most attention, posing the question as to why he has been largely silent (Cohen, 2013; Liptak, 2013; McGough, 2014). In order for legal debate to occur, deliberations of the Supreme Court must be conducted through the spoken word; and thus, Thomas's withholding from oral arguments since 2006 is considered a remarkable period of silence. He made news in 2013 when he finally spoke out in court, although his brief remark was inaudible overall: his utterance, well - he did not, was the fragment recorded in the court transcript (Liptak, 2013; McGough, 2014). Thomas's influence on the legislative process is now historicized by the event of his non-speech act, his not giving voice to his constituents as the second African-American Justice to be confirmed in the history of the Court. Jacques Derrida (1992, p.13) explains that the role of speech constitutes the very emergence of justice and law, the founding and justifying moment that institutes law implies a performative force, which is always an interpretative force.In addressing that makes no Difference for this special issue of Wagadu, the act provides another context for reviewing the non-performativity of intersectionality and diversity, particularly within the political economy of state institutions, civic forums and education. The important outcome of Hill's testimony was the development of intersectionality and Kimberle Crenshaw's exposure of the absence of advocacy for women of color (Adewunmi, 2014). The (non-)impact of Hill's speech on both legislative and judicial institutions was highly influential in the 1990s feminist discourse, and twenty-five years later, a return to this longstanding civic context for analyzing speech and power shifts the focus toward Thomas's inexplicable silence on the Supreme Court bench. The (non-)speech constitutes the negative properties of the speech act, the opposite of J.L. Austin's emphasis on the contractual do, I swear of performative utterances that are ritually and socially conventional and yet function as legally binding acts within the civic institution (Austin, 1962). Based on the expansion of the meaning of the speech act, defined by utterances, illocutionary force, and the need to be heard, the aim of this study is to investigate institutional silencing in relation to self-silencing as exemplified by Thomas.In the broader scope of silencing acts, the detrimental effects can be examined by looking at judgments of racial and sexual biases found in educational processes that are ultimately legislated state processes. A clear public case for examining institutional silencing emerges with the recent elimination of the voice given to Mexican-Americans under Arizona's 2010 House Bill 2281. The bill not only prohibits public schools from teaching material focused on a particular ethnic group, but also removes Spanish-speaking teachers with heavy accents from their teaching positions in Arizona schools (Jordan, 2010). …
IntroductionGlobal justice is first and foremost concerned with material injustices, such as poverty and a lack of basic goods, while the underlying system of knowledge production, namely the production and distribution of our knowledge about these injustices and about how they can be overcome, is largely neglected. This comes with a reliance of most concepts of global justice on a specific form of third-person knowledge, which can be characterized as distant, big1, unpersonal, thin2 and objectified. Such knowledge presents us with figures and numbers about hundreds of millions of people living in misery, but the voices and experiences of the victims of injustices are marginalized in this kind of knowledge and therefore under-represented in concepts of global justice. In order to overcome this shortcoming, I argue for a greater concern with thick and small third-person knowledge, which necessitates work with first-person testimonials, narratives and life stories. It is not a question of either/or, but a balance between different kinds of knowledge bases. Windows into reality are needed, otherwise many injustices will simply go unnoticed, unheard and will ultimately not be criticized, constituting an epistemic injustice.My paper is structured in four sections: Every concept of global justice needs a window into reality to know what injustices to criticize and how to overcome them. In the first section, I argue that concepts of global justice rely mainly on big and thin third-person knowledge about global injustices, and I explain why this increases the risk of neglecting certain forms of injustices. In the second section, I turn to epistemic injustices that are embedded within global injustices resulting in poverty and exclusion as well as in the production of knowledge about these injustices. Concepts of global justice that rely on big and thin third-person knowledge are often not concerned with the production of this kind of knowledge and the ways epistemic injustices are present in it. Besides being the victims of harsh injustices, the global poor are also trapped in a state of epistemic powerlessness. In the following third section, I propose the concepts of thick and mall third-person knowledge to empower the victims of (epistemic) injustices by giving them the opportunity to tell their stories and their experiences. Thus, people acquiring this kind of knowledge should be able to gain deep insights into such injustices and into the ways they affect the victims and their lives. In the fourth and final section I argue for a balance between different types of windows into reality and connect this matter to issues of empowerment and recognition.Theories of Global Justice and Windows into RealityTheories of global justice often start with the observation that our contemporary world is radically unjust, and they try to come-up with answers that can help us to remove these injustices. Furthermore, most theories of global justice acknowledge that they rely on empirical findings they cannot produce themselves, including data about the state of the world's poor, the conditions they live in, the institutional arrangements on the national and global level that produce, reproduce or reduce poverty as well as the political and legal systems that shape these arrangements. According to many theorists, global justice, if it wants to be considered as a venture that is as feasible as it is reasonable, has to take these non-ideal circumstances and the limits they pose into account, not only for the realization of global justice but also with regard to its conceptualization. This point is made strongly by the so-called non-ideal camp, whose proponents argue that we need to know a lot about the world to apply and to design theories of justice - opposed to the so-called ideal camp, whose proponents argue that we should refrain from as much empirical influence as possible when we design theories of justice (Valentini, 2012). …
It is well known that prominent features of the New Public Management movement include market-like mechanisms, such as privatization and outsourcing in the public sector. It is also known that in the quest for efficiency and effectiveness, public sector values may slip through the cracks, including the protection of women’s interests. As governments have not yet been able to eliminate the need to protect women’s interests amidst an ever changing and expanding global economy, it is likely that once responsibilities associated with protecting women’s interests are privatized, government has even less control over outcomes and fewer incentives to regain control, which can further disenfranchise women. This study reviews several studies that have examined the association between government privatization and outsourcing and women, an area of inquiry that remains vastly understudied. The reviewed studies shed light on the examined association in Italy, India and the United States. As DeLysa Burnier (2003) stated, American public administration has a “gender room” that has not been fully established; this paper suggests gender work related to privatization is in need of further empirical attention that will have academic and practical implications.
In the United States especially, race is a constitutive element of our common sense, and thus is a key component of our taken-for-granted valid reference schema, through which we get on in the world.-A. Shultz and T. Luckman, Cultural Theory, 1974"Respect" was what I heard over and over when talking with men..., especially black men. I interpret this this type of respect to be a crystallization of the masculine quests for recognition through public achievement, unfolding within a system of structured constraints due to class and race inequities.-Michael Messner, Politics of Masculinity, 1979I argue that identities are grounded in social locations, and I make use of resources from hermeneutics and phenomenology to explicate the epistemic, the metaphysical and politically relevant features of identities...in social theory and practice.-Linda Alcoff, Visible Identities, 2006Immigration policy has long been controversial in the United States and has at times been used in openly racist ways. It has become even more controversial in the new century, as a plan proposed in Congress to both tighten border security and provide a path to citizenship for estimated 11-12 million undocumented aliens already present in the United States failed in 2007 amid opposition from both sides... Afterwards, for the first time, the United State began to construct a fence along with Mexico to keep people out its border.-John E. Farley, Minority-Majority Relations, 2012IntroductionRace, ethnicity and social identity are complex phenomena in the United States and the rest of the world. The discourse over race, heteropatriarchal masculinity and immigration policy, like other critical political issues makes racial analysis for the American presidency novel in the minds of many scholars. Yet, the lack of agency for race in President Obama's deliberations and immigration policy, tend to puzzle many socio-political observers. Recent antagonisms against undocumented immigrants of color, especially Latinos, have pushed the conversation over race and immigration beyond the Blacks/Whites paradigm. The euphoric prognosis about the Obama presidency, post-racialism, and the politics of change subsided in Obama's second year of office.Even though many Americans were and are in denial, race was and still is a major conversation piece and the elephant in the room, when the President interacts with the United States Congress or engages in any public space. The issues of Obama's electability, reelection, respectability, masculinity, leadership style, policymaking and implementation and approval rating are all submerged in a convoluted discursive consciousness of the American people. The interlocutors of race, immigration narratives, and racial matrix of domination have reached a new level of contumacy, perhaps because of the President's racial identity and background. On January 27, 2010 after President Obama's State of the Union Address, Chris Matthew, MSNBC host, had this characterization of the President, "He is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour" (Matthews 2010). Does this statement by interlocutors of race and racial issues in the United States such as Mathews mean anything to the racial narrative of the country? What has happened to racial categorization and group political consciousness of racial issues since Obama became president? Has White privilege, an unearned advantage for Whites because of their skin color and status, changed or have Blacks gained any privilege in recent times because of race? In order to answer these questions one has to interrogate racial history, racial group dynamics, identity politics, and group prejudice plus institutional power with reference to policymaking and implementation. Even though the President intentionally avoided the race question for the first six years of his presidency and had episodically made statements involving race, in his interview with the New Yorker magazine he impugned:There's no doubt that there's some folks who just really dislike me because they don't like the idea of a black president. …
IntroductionI begin this paper with a reflection on an event in honor of a well-known, well-respected feminist scholar of color; one who has inspired my work and much of the work of my friends and colleagues. During the celebration of this scholar's contributions to the field of academic research, scholars, academics and researchers argued, publicly, over whether the honoree's contributions were in the form of theory (having enriched the scholarly canon with theoretical concepts and frameworks) or in speaking from her experience (from her location as a racialised woman, offering insightful gains for research in general). The room felt tense, divided, and very uncomfortable. That a woman of color's contributions to scholarship could be either theoretical or lived experience, but not both, angered quite a few attendees. That certain bodies in the room could even reduce her contributions to experience angered many others, who felt that the comments reflected the tendency of many western academics to pigeonhole women of color into experiential/emotional writers (Trinh, 1989). The assumption made (or inferred) by some was that the lived experience of a racialised woman in academia counted for something, but that it wasn't really "book knowledge" (hooks, 1994). Or, more to the point, that in speaking from her experiences, this scholar offered no other value than to occupy the role of the native informant (Khan, 2005) who "translates her culture for the researcher, the outsider" (p. 2023).I would like to note here that this reflection does not to disclaim or discredit the many white feminist researchers and scholars who might also have their scholarship be reduced to "experience;" nor for that matter to shadow what experience has meant (or not meant) to the field of research in general from any non-dominant group member. I simply want to trouble the multiple axes of power that for some, would reduce this racialised woman's scholarship merely to moments of experiential insight, as connected to and building upon what others before her have done and what others after her will continue to do. This analysis cannot be done independently of complicating the ontological and epistemological traditions that secure what is knowledge and what is not knowledge, or more accurately, who is a knower and who is not a knower.This paper seeks to examine the role of Eurocentrism, dominance, hegemony and colonialism in the production and re-production of "legitimate" knowledge and knowers in the western world. Using race-based epistemologies, I will argue that the subaltern body is socially, politically and racially marginalized so that they can never express their ways of knowing and reasoning without being "Othered," oppressed and repressed, across time and space. However, I also argue that, while the racialised Other is marginalized, s/he is also a necessary condition for the continuation of colonial and epistemic violence in mainstream institutions. The acknowledgement of this position is not meant to destabilize movements by racialised groups (or any other oppressed groups for that matter) to challenge the epistemic violence of imperialism that powerful groups continue to defend. Conversely, it is a matter of identifying an epistemologically sound space for racialised bodies in relation to dominance that secures these "alternative" ways of knowing; that allows for a "racialised Other" to speak. As such, the role and rigor of dominance is central to race-based epistemologies, and central to this paper. To begin however, we must link Eurocentric, western dominance to its historical and ontological roots, specifically to understand the nature of reality upon which racial classifications are based.Ontology of raceScholars argue that in order to challenge racism in social research, we must be vigilant about deconstructing the nature of truth and reality upon which epistemologies are generally based (Anzuldua, 1987; Bernal, 2002; Canella & Lincoln, 2004; Denzin, 2002; Hill Collins, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 2000, 2003; Pillow, 2000; and Soloranzo & Yosso, 2002). …
IntroductionNothing gives us x-ray vision to the ills of society like the daunting experience of incarceration, especially the horror of solitary and death row, as well as the intense stress of anticipating or being subjected to torture or extra-legal execution. During much of her pre-trial incarceration (of sixteen months) Angela Davis was kept in solitary confinement. The other activist woman featured in this essay, Assata Shakur, was broken out of prison precisely because she feared for her life-not by other prisoners, but by the state's agents. It would have been extremely difficult to receive justice after flawed trials that intended to show that she was guilty of murdering a white state trooper, even though there was no evidence that could corroborate such motive or deed. In fact, the post-Ferguson photo montages and demonstrations with protestors' raised symbolically and shouts of hands up, don't could have easily been used as rallying cry to demand Shakur's acquittal. In all likelihood, she had her raised while being shot into her right hand, making it impossible for her to hold a gun, let alone to shoot what was not meant to be. At the height of a secret and illegal government program COINTELPRO, which the FBI mounted to destroy the Black Panther Party (with which both Davis and Shakur worked) and all other organizations which protested state terror and imperialist warfare, Shakur was found guilty by a white jury not of her peers (Shakur, 1987).Prisons have always served the role of social control (Kurshan, 1996), but they are also tremendous sites of cultural, social and political activity, namely as diasporic sites (Nagel, 2008). Nobody has more acutely theorized about the function of imprisonment than political prisoners, thus they find themselves singled out for acute repression and women are equally targeted. Part of it may be the authorities' fear of such prison intellectuals' savvy critique of hegemonic ideologies and uncanny ability to see through the level of disinformation by elite corporate media. This ability often is borne inside the dungeon. For my purposes here, political prisoners include people convicted due to their resistance to repressive state policies and politics and those who become politicized while facing detention and/or long prison sentences. Many political prisoners such as Assata Shakur and Angela Davis have engaged in prisoners support work before they were incarcerated themselves. For opposing the state, they face further reprisals by the prison authorities. For instance, if a prisoner complaints we are treated like slaves! within earshot of guards, she may get time in the hole-weeks in solitary confinement, as if she had committed the act to call for a slave insurrection. Ironically, the complainant is simply stating the obvious: The U.S. Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which putatively abolished slavery, describes prisoners as legal slaves. Therefore, they do not enjoy freedom of speech or freedom to assemble peacefully within a total institution. However, the US government denies confining people for political convictions and that all socalled political prisoners are duly convicted of a (terrorist) crime. Yet, the US government's claim is hardly credible, in particular in light of CIA run prisons, which defied even U.S. Supreme Court rulings, notably Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In addition, the state routinely disappears prisoners who are not a security threat into supermax prisons, which contribute to (mental) health abuse and premature death (Amnesty International, 2014).Much mainstream reporting or prison literature ignores the gendered nature of prisons (and ignores writings by revolutionary prison intellectuals altogether). For instance, the mass media did not focus on Iraqi women prisoners who had also been sexually abused, raped, humiliated and even disappeared, as the human rights groups International Women Count Network, Black Women's Rape Action Project, and Women against Rape have charged (Groves, 2004). …
In the last decades, marketization has been a ubiquitous development in Western European Welfare States. In this context, contracting out social services has become a common phenomenon. While the impact of contracting out on working conditions has received attention in the social sciences, the legal implications brought forth by these developments are largely neglected. Addressing this gap, the article examines the legal framework of public contracting in the European Union as provided by European public procurement law and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Starting with a brief characterization of the specifics of public contracting, it provides an overview of the development of European regulations. Focusing on the impact European legislation and jurisdiction have on the possibility to take into account social criteria in general as well as gender equality; it examines the legal possibilities provided by European law as well as the limits it imposes. It is argued that while European public procurement law explicitly allows for measures to foster gender equality in public tendering, European legislation and jurisdiction also impose limits to the range of these measures.
IntroductionIn her recent analysis of debates over the issue of skill recognition, Armstrong (2013) raises the salience of issues relating to time in the field. She reminds us that time is involved in the ways skills are defined, assessed and practiced (p. 274). Moreover, drawing on the organization of work in health services, Armstrong shows that under the New Public Management (NPM) shaping of social services, women in caring occupations are unable to manifest their occupational skills because of time constrains embedded in the work process. In looking at the role of states in promoting deskilling as linked to time allocation in social services, she recognizes that measurement has replaced the notion of a caring service. But, how did time constraints become so salient to deskilling in caring occupations? What institutional spaces shape these time constraints? Are time constraints imposed on core employees and peripheral employees in similar ways? I attempt to examine these questions by investigating a very specific organizational space: that of public procurement of social services. While authors agree that employment conditions in commissioned service deliverers are often bad (Cunningham, 2011), not enough attention has been directed to the administrative procedures responsible for this outcome. Through unveiling the dynamics behind the state administrators' definition of the funding needs of services, I attempt to shed light on a specific gendered reality that arises within public procurement of services.During the early stages of public procurement of services, state administrators gave a disproportionate weight to the price criterion in selecting a service deliverer among all bidders. Previous accounts of the process of contracting out showed that at this stage, state administrators failed to act as the 'smart client' in at least two ways: they were not using information accumulated about specific deliverers, and they allowed service deliverers to make demands for additional funding, framing these demands as unexpected costs (Grimshow and Hebson, 2005). After much criticism of state support for the cheapest bid, more elaborate systems of bidder selection were introduced based on the need to calculate the reasonable cost of a service. Such preliminary calculation enabled state administrators to set forth a threshold sum for the service and reinforced state's ability to argue that services procurement practices followed legal requirements with regard to services employment. In the process of setting forth a threshold sum, the state became a smarter client by reducing its exposure to financial pressures exerted by service deliverers. However, this administrative calculation becomes a key feature when analyzing polarization in contemporary care employment.Fine has recently (2014) articulated the basis of the polarization that occurs in caring occupations, emphasizing the differential institutional treatment of two categories of employees. He argues that contemporary operation of services offers reasonable employment rewards for those in 'core' skilled, professional and reasonably secure employment. But those considered 'peripheral' workers are forced to accept 'flexible' employment arrangements, as they are not in a strong position to negotiate with employers (p. 271). Fine's distinction in the area of caring employees suggests that in order to understand how time allocation is used institutionally and how it contributes to polarization, we need to examine two distinct approaches: that related to shaping conditions for those with relevant credentials (formally accredited social workers, nurses or teachers) and those who do not have them. In what follows I trace this distinction in the Israeli government's tender calls. In the remainder of this introduction, I define deskilling and its related mechanisms, and then I introduce my theoretical framework.Skill Recognition vs. DeskillingThe earliest definitions of deskilling referred to the introduction of technology into the workplace. …
In San Francisco in 1998, after a year and a half battle, a coalition of three nonprofit organizations, WILD for Human Rights, the Western Division of Amnesty International, and the Women's Foundation of California, partnered with the county's Commission on the Status of Women (COSW) to successfully adopt an ordinance based on the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The federal government in the United States has yet to sanction the pact. This article provides a background about the circumstances that enabled San Francisco to adopt the ordinance. It also examines the successes and failures of the coalition's three core goals that motivated it to lobby the local government to adopt the ordinance. First, the coalition intended to draw attention to women's human rights and influence local governments in the nation to implement similar policies, second, it hoped to initiate a proactive approach to combatting sexism through a collaborative approach, and third, it strived to mainstream gender equality into city departments. Although adoption of the ordinance failed to comprehensively meet all of the goals, it contributed to critical conversations about strategies of activism for gender equality that includes an intersectionality analysis.Defining Human Rights NormsPrior to investigating the term norms that is commonly used in human rights discourse, it is critical to examine the scope of rights. First, every right is not treated equal. Understanding the nature of the 'right' involved can help clarify one's consideration of the degree of protection available, the nature of derogations or exceptions, the priorities to be afforded to various rights, [and] the question of the hierarchal relationships in a series of rights... (Shestack, 1998, p. 204). Members of communities that have the most economic and political power have the greatest ability to frame and monitor rights. This rings true when interrogating the historical construction and interpretation of human rights that conceptualized males as the norm (Reilly, 2009, p. 3; Peach, 2001, p. 154). Drafters of early international human rights treaties were almost in totality men, and thus agreements produced by the drafters reflect their desires for rights (Bunch, 1995, p. 13). Human rights pacts since the United Nations crystallized and up to the present day are primarily focused on public life even though women have notable need for protection in private life (Bunch, 1995, p. 13). This occurs in part because when rights statutes are drafted, in order to avoid lengthy debates about proper wording to include, phrases from past treaties are input into the new multilateral agreements (Merry, 2006, p. 43). Yet, due to events such as the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, women's are increasingly entering into discourse about human rights (Balchin, 2011, p. 12). Despite women's heightened participation in shaping and monitoring human rights, these advocates for gender equality have had difficulty gaining support for women's rights, which are often seen as tangential to established [male-biased] priorities or as secondary, less important issues (Htun & Weldon, 2012, p. 553).Nevertheless, in contemporary political and academic human rights discourse it is common to refer to rights produced by international treaties as norms, despite most treaties' lack of ability to address women's needs equally to men's and the needs of diverse income groups. Although this article utilizes the term norms, it is critical to understand the limitations of the term and its incapability to comprehensively represent diversity cross culturally. The term should be understood considering a number of realities. Overall, wealthier countries send more delegates to UN conventions than poorer countries, and wording debates for treaties are held in English, which denotes that delegates who have not mastered the language have greater difficulty shaping what are referred to as international norms (Merry, 2006, p. …
